It's the other way around. First thing that enshittified search was how all people moved to walled off platforms, so whatever they wrote was missing from the search engines. Before that, they'd used to write a public blog post on whether that wifi card was working in their Thinkpad Txy.

Nowadays we're in a war between AI scrapers and the rest of the world. Everyone has Cloudflare, Anubis and 5 other means of protection in front of their website. Of course that generally also locks out the Google and Bing crawler. So search becomes useless. But it's not like it's deliberately done in order to steer people towards AI... It's that AI scrapers have unleashed some war that made people lock out crawlers, which in turn ruined web search.

And a few companies like Reddit are trying to make a profit out of this. They'll lock down and also sell access to crawlers. Not sure if they grant access to Google or if Google has some deal with them.